Use track records to pick winning horses | Hawkes Bay Sport | Surfing, Rugby, Soccer, Football, Cricket in Hawkes Bay

THE first thing to look at when analysing the form for a Group 1 weight-for-age race is what experts like to call "class" - the ability the horses have shown in their starts to date.

For this, you can look at the number of wins relative to the number of starts and then how many of those good performances came in listed or group races, and what sort of horses they were running against.

In terms of natural ability, I rated Vosne Romanee, Wall Street and Keep The Peace as the best three in the race. Keep The Peace  stood out to me in this regard because she was a 4-year-old mare coming into the Hastings carnival after an excellent three-year season.

 
 She won four races last season, including the Group 1 New Zealand Oaks, and was also beaten narrowly by my pick for Horse of the Year for the 2009-10 season, Katie Lee, in the New Zealand 1000 Guineas.  Keep The Peace would have been only the third horse in the last 15 years to win both of those races.
 

The next thing to look at is the distance of the race - 1400m. This is often a distance that trips up even the classiest horses. Against a field of horses that are suited to the distance and have high cruising speeds, some of the runners  just find their opponents a bit too sharp over 1400m and struggle to keep up through the early and middle stages of the race.

So it proved for the wonderful Vosne Romanee on Saturday. He  should be  suited by the 2040m of the Spring Classic.

 In a race at Trentham last October, Keep The Peace proved she could handle 1400m and   also met the last  test for Saturday's race - rain-affected ground. Against a field of 3-year-old fillies, some of which were held in high regard, Keep The Peace romped away to win by 6 lengths.   That race came to mind  when I saw what conditions horses were likely to face in Saturday's Mudgway.
 

That's the strategy I adopted in selecting Keep The Peace as the most likely winner of the Mudgway PartsWorld Stakes. 

But I picked only one other winner and none of the horses I picked to win the other eight races finished in the first three. So my advice should be taken with a grain of salt.